Contagion (Toxic City Book Three)

by Tim Lebbon

  Lucy-Anne and blood and then there is no more air because…

  She stood, cautious still of the bomb and its traps. Summoning every scrap of what she had, everything that had set her apart since Doomsday and still did now, she became less human than she ever had before.

  And in the blink of an eye, she went to change the future.

  Lucy-Anne stood in the smashed window and looked out at the street, and she had seen some of this before. It wasn't quite right…but even as she watched, events steered themselves towards what she knew was to come.

  Reaper fell back as bullets ripped along the street. Jack was shoved across the car bonnet and fell onto the pavement, and the dark man who'd been holding him dropped behind the car. The vehicle jerked on its suspension as bullets stitched across the roof and windows exploded outwards.

  “Jack!” Jenna called. She stood beside Lucy-Anne, eager to help but knowing that to do so would be suicide.

  Can it get any worse? Lucy-Anne thought. She looked down beside her at Hayden cowering beneath the window sill. He was holding a blood-soaked handkerchief to Fleeter's face, and the girl's limbs were jerking and slapping the floor.

  “Sparky!” Jenna shouted. She darted out into the street just as the helicopter passed overhead in a roar and a cloud of dust. It was so low that Lucy-Anne could see the pilot's eyes as he looked down, and she wondered what he saw. People? Or monsters?

  There were both down here.

  Sparky was lying across the other side of the street. He was on his back, one hand held up, one knee raised. His blond hair was now dark with blood. The thing attacking him had fled at the gunfire. Probably more sensible than they were.

  Jenna was running towards him as the Chopper motorcycles powered along the street.

  “Jenna, run!” Lucy-Anne shouted.

  Reaper stood and turned towards the motorcycles. Now he'll shout them to smithereens, Lucy-Anne thought, but he held his chest as he roared, and the result was not as dramatic as she expected.

  The lead motorcycle swerved, struck a parked van and flipped, spilling its rider and rolling past Reaper and the prone Sparky. It missed Jenna by inches and smashed against another vehicle, spinning on its side on the street and then bursting into flames. Spilled fuel flowed, carrying the fire wide.

  The rider stood on shaky legs, one hand pressed to her side, the other tugging a pistol from a holster on her belt. As she lifted the weapon the air around her hazed and she seemed to crumple, skin glistening with frost. She coughed, and ice formed in the air before her. A tall Asian woman appeared from the shadows behind her and knocked her aside. She knelt beside the fallen Chopper, pressed her mouth across the struggling woman's mouth, and Lucy-Anne turned away.

  The other two Choppers braked, turned, and powered back along the street.

  Kill them! she thought, but Reaper was slowly bending over as if winded. Had he caught a bullet? She didn't know.

  The helicopter opened up again and Shade screamed. He appeared from a shadow Lucy-Anne had not been aware of and stumbled across the street, both hands pressed to his guts, blinded by pain. Agony gave him form.

  “Shade!” Reaper shouted, but the shadow man seemed not to hear. He staggered directly into the flaming pool of fuel, and his scream turned into a shriek.

  Lucy-Anne dashed across to Jack. He was bleeding and holding one hand to his wounded eye. “Do something!” she shouted at Reaper, looking up at the helicopter cruising slowly towards them back along the street. Fire leapt from its machine guns. Bullets ricocheted.

  “Lucy-Anne, got to get back…got to…” Jack said. He reached for her, staggered forwards, and she held out her hands for him.

  From her right, the roar of motorcycles again. The rattle of small-arms fire.

  Ahead of her, Jenna was kneeling by Sparky.

  Along the street, Shade was screaming, stumbling, aflame, trying to reel in his spilling guts.

  Now, she thought. Now is when Nomad—

  Something smacked her in the face, knocked her head sideways.

  As she tried to breathe and gargled only blood, she saw what she knew must come.

  “No!” Jack shouted. “No, Lucy-Anne, no!” He couldn't quite understand what he had seen, how her face could have changed shape so quickly. She was still Lucy-Anne, but no longer the girl he had known. The cool, logical part of him knew that she had been shot. But the pure emotional part of him that drove to the fore in this time of confusion and bullets, burning and blood, could not readily accept the truth.

  She stumbled to the left, one hand coming up towards her face but never quite touching. Her pale skin was raw now, and her spiky hair was dulled by the colour contrast of her blood. Her eyes started to roll up in her head.

  The rush of fury was terrifying. Jack's heart thudded in his chest, the heaviest impact, and his skin came alight, tempering his thoughts and sharpening his senses until he could see like a hawk, hear like a hound. What happened next was pure instinct, and yet he felt totally in control. For the first time ever, Jack and his new abilities worked completely in harmony. They flowed together, and were one.

  As easy as breathing, he turned and pushed a heat wave along the street that peeled paint, melted glass, and ignited gas in fuel tanks. The two motorcycles erupted, enveloping their riders in flames, swerving and striking parked vehicles. Several cars and vans also exploded, and glass and twisted car body parts flew in a deadly flock across the road. One rider screamed, but not for long.

  The helicopter pilot pulled up and tipped the aircraft away from the chaotic street. But not soon enough. Jack's shout caught it and brought it down, and it struck a roof and thrashed onto its side.

  He closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. His tumultuous universe settled. He turned away from the crashing helicopter and the burning chaos along the street, and went to hold his friend.

  But someone was there before him.

  In a blink, everything changed. There was a clap! that reverberated through buildings and ground, and Jack's first thought was, Everything has been renewed. From the moment before the sound to the moment after, the potential of the future seemed to have shifted hugely, and he felt a moment of consuming elation that he had not experienced since before Doomsday. He could not explain it. And he did not try. So much was beyond explanation.

  As Lucy-Anne slumped towards the ground, Nomad ran along the street. She leapt a burning motorcycle and ran at Lucy-Anne, grasped her as she fell, pushed her onto her back, and then she raised a hand above her head, middle and forefingers pointing.

  What is she—? Jack thought, and then Nomad brought her fist down and punched a hole in Lucy-Anne's throat.

  “What?” Jack whispered. His voice was a calm breath amongst the burning and crashing and the breaking of things.

  Lucy-Anne arched her back and shuddered. Nomad raised her hand again, splashing blood across the road, blood also dripping from her hand. Lucy-Anne's blood.

  Yet again, Jack's instinct took over.

  And here she comes, Nomad, another movement in the chaotic street and yet the focus of everything. Flames lean away from her. She is the centre. She runs and jumps a burning motorcycle and her feet barely seems to touch the ground, and then she knocks Lucy-Anne down.

  Lucy-Anne draws in a breath to scream, but blood floods into her lungs.

  She tries to punch at Nomad, but her limbs do not obey her commands.

  Pain rings in, but it is the ice-cool pain of trauma and shock. Her chest is heavy. She cannot breathe past whatever has happened to her face.

  And then Nomad punches straightened fingers down at her throat, and Lucy-Anne feels the hot, painful rush of air into her lungs once more.

  He saw Lucy-Anne shudder as a breath flooded in, and somewhere inside, somehow, he sensed the relief bleeding through her shock and pain. Other, more destructive powers reined in, and his skin tingled from his ears to the tips of his toes.

  Nomad looked at him and almost smiled. Jack wondered what would h
ave happened had he unleashed any of those powers. She looked weak and was bleeding from her nose and the corners of her eyes, yet she was still strange, almost alien, and removed from what was happening.

  “Jack,” a voice said. Jack frowned, but could not take his eyes off Nomad and Lucy-Anne. Maybe she's dead anyway, he thought, but he saw his friend moving as she struggled against the pain coursing in. She'd been shot in the face.

  “Jack!”

  Jack turned, and Reaper was behind him. “Not out of danger yet,” the man who had been his father said. “And I…” He touched his throat, as if to signal what was wrong. Behind him stood Haru, blinking rapidly, seeming exhausted. For the first time Reaper looked weak, uncertain, as if something had been stripped away and he had been lessened. Was he scared? Jack wasn't sure about that. But he did see something in his father's eyes that gave him a moment of satisfaction in this terrible time—respect.

  “Sparky?” Jack called. The boy was sitting against a shop front across the street now, Jenna beside him. He raised a hand and waved. Bloody but alive, Jack thought, and that was as good as he could hope for right now.

  Fires crackled, glass broke, metal buckled. The street was a symphony of destruction. The helicopter was settling into the sagging roof of a jeweller's, lying on its side with rotors snapped off, fuel gushing down the shop's facade. Two Choppers had climbed from the wreck and were trying to crawl across the rooftop to an adjoining property.

  Jack's heart sank, so quickly and deeply that sour sickness rose in his throat. I've done it again. He could see a burning corpse tangled with the wreckage of a motorcycle, and the stench was terrible. He looked at the climbing, scrambling Choppers and wondered who they were. There must have been more in the helicopter, dead or dying.

  “I've done it again,” he said aloud.

  “She's…” Hayden said. He was climbing from the restaurant window, pale and shaking. “She's…”

  “Fleeter?” Jack asked. Hayden nodded.

  There was no sign of the evolved humans, creatures, monsters. Survival was their sharpest instinct.

  It was becoming Jack's as well. Now that everything had gone bad, and people were dying, and he was killing again, survival was all that mattered. And Hayden was key to that.

  “Come here,” Jack said. “Quickly. Carefully.” He reached out one hand.

  Hayden started towards him, looking down at Lucy-Anne and Nomad, then at the ruins and wrecks of machines and people across the street. Shade burned and sizzled, no longer casting shadows. Now he was just another dead man.

  “He's our hope,” Jack said, nodding towards Hayden. He did not even glance back at Reaper to see if the man was listening. Jack knew it, and that was all that mattered. Everything rested in this man's hands.

  “Jack,” Reaper said, panicked, “quickly, I can't, I can't do it, but you have to look now!”

  Lucy-Anne felt apart from herself. The unbearable pain was borne by someone else. She might have been dying. Nomad knelt beside her and she looked different somehow, less than what she used to be. She was bleeding.

  I came here for you, Nomad said in her mind, but Lucy-Anne could not be sure whether the woman had really said it, or if she'd imagined those words.

  Lucy-Anne tilted her head to the side and tried to scream at the agony, but she could make no sound. Her body was no longer hers; pain was its master now.

  There, she thought, returning Hayden's gaze as he stared down at her in frank fascination. There's our only hope. And I've never dreamed this far.

  And Hayden's shocked expression vanished in a haze of blood and bone as he danced to gunfire's tune.

  “No!” Jack shouted.

  Instinct—

  He crouched and turned, reaching out and lifting the two surviving Choppers from the rooftop. Even as he was suspended in mid-air one of them swung his rifle, and Jack super-heated the weapon, melting it and the man's hand to a slick mess. The man screamed.

  Jack heaved them over the rooftop and they disappeared beyond, falling and dying out of sight.

  Jack dashed past Lucy-Anne and Nomad and knelt beside Hayden, reaching out ready to clasp and heal, hands heavy with powers he had only just begun to understand. But there was no healing these wounds. No powers on earth could gather these scattered brains, bring them together, make sense of them again. Their chance at stopping the bomb—their hope for the future—lay dead in a bloody mess across the road's surface.

  Jack closed his eyes and searched, harder than he ever had before. But there was no trace of Hayden. He had been living and now he was dead, and there was no point in between from which Jack could gather any knowledge that might help.

  It had all gone to shit.

  The taint of pointless deaths forever staining his soul, he slumped down in the street, lost.

  “They did something to us,” Reaper said. “At the edge of London. Crossing the Exclusion Zone. They fired several artillery shells. I thought they were just bad shots, but then I smelled something, felt strange. Tired. It must have been some sort of gas to knock us out, but Haru froze the worst of it into ice. I didn't know what they'd done until I tried to…to shout.” He was struggling to sound strong, as dismissive as he'd always been. But his fear was leaking through. Jack didn't think it was fear of death. He thought that Reaper was more scared of losing his destructive power for good and being normal again.

  “They stole his shout,” Haru said. “They stole my cold.”

  “Miller's last revenge?” Jenna suggested.

  “He's dead?” Reaper asked.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “The Choppers know what's happening, so when you went to them it was a gift. Their last chance to trap you Superiors so they still have someone to experiment on when everything's blown wide. And they wouldn't want such murderers breaking out of London.”

  “You'd call me a murderer, Jack?” Reaper asked, eyebrow raised.

  But right then, Jack didn't care. So much had happened that he was finding it difficult to care about anything. He was withdrawn, distant from everyone and everything, prisoner of his own guilt and struggling to see light anywhere. The sun was down now, over London and in his mind. Darkness ruled.

  Outside, something cried out in the night. He listened, but it was not human. Rhali was still lost.

  “But you led them to us!” Jenna said. “Why the hell would you do that? Why would you think that was anything like a good idea?”

  “We weren't sure they were following.”

  “Bullshit!” Jenna shouted. Reaper flinched, face stern. But he did not respond. “What, were you scared? When you found you couldn't shout someone apart? And are you so-called Superiors just the thickest crusts of dog shit on the shittiest covered shit-shoe in the history of shit? Are you? Huh? You've wiped out pretty much everyone who can do something about the bomb, and now we've got the last one here, you lead the Choppers right to us!” She looked ready to rage some more, but her fury seemed to wane as quickly as it had risen. She pointed at Lucy-Anne. “And look what happens.” Her voice was suddenly lighter, sadder. “Just look.”

  Lucy-Anne was sleeping in the corner of the large room. It had been a nightclub of some sort at one point, probably turned into a drinking club soon before Doomsday. There were no bodies in here, but plenty of canned drinks and bottled water, and crisps and nuts. The main attraction, though, was its lack of windows. They were shut off in here. Jack wondered whether, if he really thought about it, he could cut himself off from everything that had happened outside.

  But he could still smell the blood and feel the desperation of his friends.

  He was tired. Sparky's wounds had been simple to tend to. He'd be scarred, but Jack had stopped the bleeding and knitted flesh where his two worst lacerations lay open to the bone. But Lucy-Anne's wound was far different. The bullet had passed clean through her face, but in doing so it had done major damage. Her lower jaw was broken, teeth smashed, cheekbones cracked. Her broken teeth had been driven into her throat, and if it
hadn't been for Nomad opening an airway—a finger tracheotomy—Lucy-Anne would have suffocated.

  As it was, Jack had eased her pain with a touch, but try as he might he'd not been able to reset the bones. Perhaps there were some who could. He had seen Rosemary's friend operate on Jenna to retrieve a bullet without opening her up. But right now, such damage was beyond his talents. She moaned, unconscious. Nomad slumped beside her, asleep herself. Nomad frightened Jack, because she gave off a heat and a stink that only he could sense. He thought she was dying, but she hadn't said a thing since they'd broken into the club. He'd moved close to her once to try to wake her up, but the heat and smell had driven him away.

  The stench of death. And the heat, for all he knew, of hell.

  “I was wrong,” Reaper said.

  “What?” Jack said, aghast.

  “I was—”

  “I heard what you said!” He could barely even look at the man. Frightening, powerful, inhuman, to hear him utter such words disturbed Jack as much as anything else. It made him realise how much was changing, and how useless everything had become.

  “So now what?” Sparky said. “I mean, thanks for sorting me out, mate. And for Lucy-Anne…for doing as much as you can for her. But now what? Rhali's gone. Your charming dad's gang are mostly dead or gone. Apart from Mrs. Frost there. And Hayden's had his brains blown out.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “I know all that.”

  “So you've got a plan?” Sparky said. “Cos we're shit out of time.”

  “No plan,” Jack said. “Other than, just…” He shrugged, because what he was going to suggest was no plan at all.

  “What?” Sparky asked. “Tell us. You sound like you've given up, and you can't sound like that. I won't let you.”

  “You saved us all back there,” Jenna said, and she cut straight to the core of what was torturing Jack. Not the bomb, or Hayden's death, or even Rhali's disappearance. It was the fact that he had killed again that made everything seem so pointless. He knew it was stupid, but he couldn't alter the way he thought. Even if everything worked out fine, he had killed to make it happen. A world where that was the price was perhaps not a world worth saving.